[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:06 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>>>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>>>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>>>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>>>
>>>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>>>
>>>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>>>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>>>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>>>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>>>> page).
>>>
>>>
>>> Half of a page for the list of authors of France.  Now, I just checked, and
>>> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages.  So
>>> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
>>> you say.
>>
>> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
>> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
>> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
>> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
>> is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
>> authors is, in fact, significant?
>
> To follow up, that's 2.5 pages of non-duplicated names, when you run
> them together in 10pt font.
> -- phoebe

Whoops! I made a mistake. The 2.5 pages is only the first 1000 authors
(I got the list from
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl, again). So the
whole list of authors would be between 9-10 pages for the 25-page
article.

Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?

--phoebe